When did you last feel competent?
I wonder how many of you shuddered as you read that opening line? When did I last feel competent? Are you testing me? Isn’t it enough that I just love Jesus and want people to know him? Short answer, yes. But part of loving him well is growing in how we join in with his mission, and that means recognising where we genuinely don’t yet know enough and being ready to grow.
The good news is, competence is not the enemy of faith. To be competent in mission can mean lots of things; learning how to explain the gospel clearly, learning how to ask better questions, learning how to listen without rushing to fix, or learning how to say, “I don’t know.” For some of us it may mean reading a few more articles or books, and for others it may mean practising starting conversations rather than waiting for the perfect moment. We are apprentices of Jesus, and apprentices learn.
This barrier is fairly easy to overcome with some intentional space and time, but we must be careful not to compound this barrier. That happens when we start subtly moving the goalposts thinking “I’ll be ready for mission once I’ve read that book...once I can answer that question...once I feel more confident.” It happens when the ‘onces’ keeps coming.
Let’s do an exercise. I’d love you to write down just three things that qualify you to do mission. They can be as big or small as you like. I’ll give you one to start if you’re struggling “I know Jesus”. If you’re struggling, ask a friend, flatmate or family member to help you complete it. Now take a look at that list. What do you notice?
If 100 of us were in the same room right now, I reckon we’d all have a delightfully varied list. Some would be more “impressive” than others, and for many of us that would make us shrink, panic, and immediately start to call ourselves incompetent. Here’s the thing: imposter syndrome will eat your competence for breakfast. And it turns out, it isn’t just you! Recent surveys have suggested that 66% of UK adults aged 18-25 have experienced it. So what do we do with that? We must name it. We will always have things we don’t know yet and need to grow in, but we must be careful not to undermine what we already have and call it “lack of competence”. Competence in mission means taking responsibility for our development while refusing to delay obedience until we feel flawless.
In Matthew 17 the disciples try and fail to cast a demon out of a young child. Now if I were one of the disciples, I feel like at that point I’d be well into the category of feeling like an imposter. Maybe my inner monologue would sound something like this “I can’t believe we had to ask for help, I’m so embarrassed, it was just a demon, I’ve seen it done loads of times, UGH I’m SO incompetent.”. But note what happens when they ask Jesus about it.
Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
You CAN say to this mountain, “move from here to there” and it WILL move. He doesn’t say, “you’re just no good at it, driving out demons isn’t your thing, you’re not competent enough”. He’d already shown them how to do it. They’d been up-skilled, but the bit missing, he tells them, is faith!
So the second barrier to mission is competence, but be careful! Competence in mission is not about whether you have a PhD in apologetics, it’s about what we know and choosing to use it in faith.
So this week ask God to speak into your competence. Ask him what he has already gifted you in, and what things you might need to add to your toolbox.
